Major Jackson

Biography of Major Jackson

Major Jackson (born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American poet and professor. He is the author of four collections of poetry: Roll Deep (W.W. Norton, 2015), Holding Company (W.W. Norton, 2010) and Hoops (W.W. Norton, 2006), finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle.

He earned degrees from Temple University and the University of Oregon. He is a professor of English at the University of Vermont and a faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

His poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poetry, and Tin House. His poetry has received critical attention in The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His work has been included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner, 2004), The Pushcart Prize XXIX: Best of the Small Presses, (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004) Schwerkraft, From the Fishouse (Persea Books, 2009), and The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010). In 2013 he edited Countee Cullen: Collected Poems, published by Library of America.

Major Jackson Poems

Mighty Pawns
If I told you Earl, the toughest kid
on my block in North Philadelphia,

On Removing the Wedding Band
As though undreaming the mountain
from the sea or tweezering hands from
a watch, a quick-fix change of regimes:

Indian Song
Freddie Hubbard—s playing the cassette deck
Forty miles outside Hays and I've looked at
This Kansas sunset for three hours now,

How to Listen
I am going to cock my head tonight like a dog
in front of McGlinchy's Tavern on Locust;
I am going to stand beside the man who works all day combing

Tremble
My neighbor is velvety and kicks serious game.
So sweet garlic refuses to hang tight
in his mouth. He pulls women to his wide chest

Superfluities
This downpour of bad reasoning, this age-old swarm,
this buzzing about town, this kick and stomp
through gardens, this snag on the way to the mall,

Designer Kisses
I'm glum about your sportive flesh in the empire of blab,
and the latest guy running his trendy tongue like a tantalizing surge
over your molars, how droll. Love by a graveyard is redundant,

Spain
Beneath canopies of green, unionists marched doggedly
outside The Embassy. Their din was no match
for light lancing through leaves of madrone trees

PoemHunter.com Updates

Mighty Pawns

If I told you Earl, the toughest kidon my block in North Philadelphia,bow-legged and ominous, could beatany man or woman in ten moves playing white,or that he traveled to Yugoslavia to frustrate the beardedmasters at the Belgrade Chess Association,you'd think I was given to hyperbole,and if, at dinnertime, I took youinto the faint light of his Section 8 home